On Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 8:57 PM Tim Düsterhus <[email protected]> wrote:

> >> As outlined above, I believe this special casing of the “subsecond
> >> boundary” is common in the real world and human communication.
> >
> > The human communication part is how the Duration provides its
> > information. That's not correlated to how they are or can be provided.
> > It is just as common in the real world to have duration information in
> > one unit only and decimal. F.e. 234.54ms. or 3.4 hours, etc. the
>
> I'm not typically seeing decimals being used for units smaller than
> seconds. 234.54ms would typically be communicated as either 234_540
> microseconds with an explicit ±10 microseconds to indicate the number of
> significant figures, or as 0.23454s. But this might be another case of
> “we made different experiences and thus feel the design should be
> different”.
>

I think we are in different realities ;-).

More seriously, and some random weekly internals on reddit made me realize
my point was not maybe not clear.

It appears to me that you confused displaying, reading properties from a
duration and how it is created. And thr the limitation to unit per higher
unit is cumbersome at best, annoying at worse. Counter intuitive and bad UX.


>
> Allowing the latter would effectively be a floating point
> representation, which is planned to be supported as an input for future
> scope. It needs some more thought than the fixed-point (seconds + nanos)
> decimal, because of the finite precision of IEEE-754 double precision
> representation.
>

sure, but having nanoseconds to fromSeconds is fine ;-). Having floating
points (all units) is not really about the IEEE-754 precision, while
important, but more about use cases. Is a duration a precision timer too?
if yes, then it will be needed and precision can be taken care of up to, or
down to, a certain level. If it is not, we should not bother. UX is more
important in that case.


>
> > set<Unit> method can extremely easily handle this. And the
>
> Small terminology note: There are no, and will be no setters. There's
> just the named constructors (`from<Unit>`).
>

Right, typo, I meant the from<Unit>.

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